When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution by Devra Davis

Author:Devra Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-01-10T06:57:00+00:00

6

THE NEW SISTERHOOD

OF BREAST CANCER

Stop expecting Prince Charming. We must rescue ourselves. We are the ones we've been waiting for.

-BELLA ABZUG

THE PHONE RANG so early one Sunday morning in 1993, I thought it had to be bad news or a wrong number. A voice boomed through the receiver.

"This is Bella. My friends are dropping like flies. I'm gonna have a hearing at City Hall on breast cancer and the environment. March 20. I want you to be there" I had never met the woman, but I recognized that distinctive timbre, at once familiar and commanding. Why was Bella Abzug calling me to talk about breast cancer?

Bella did not have the disease, but like many in the mid-1990s, she was enraged by what was happening to her friends. She was scandalized by the growing number of treatment failures and missed diagnoses and by the unacceptably shabby medical care for poor women. During Bella's childhood, one in forty women developed breast cancer at some point in her life. By the time she was student body president at Hunter College and editor in chief of the Law Review at Columbia University, the rate was one in twenty. Now in her seventies, Bella wanted to know why breast cancer attacked one in nine women by age eighty-five. She was convinced that scientists had not done a very good job of connecting the disease with where and how women lived and worked, and she insisted that I should do something about this.

When Aldo Leopold wrote, "We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness," he could not have been imagining Bella. She was a woman who consistently defied the status quo. And she did not hesitate to lash out at those who followed her, if she thought them lacking sufficient zeal or commitment. Given the way Bella treated her friends, I was glad not to be among her enemies.

As a member of the House of Representatives from 1970 to 1976 and a founder of the modern feminist movement, Bella had shaped the nation's history. Geraldine Ferraro said at her funeral in 1998 that Bella had kicked down doors so that the rest of us could walk through. In the 1950s, as a young, pregnant lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, Bella traveled to the South to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. She slept in bus stations when no motel would take her in. In the 1960s, she championed nuclear disarmament, organized Mothers' March for Peace, and walked with the rainbow coalitions of the civil rights movement, always wearing her trademark wide-brimmed hats. Her unrelenting rhetoric fueled the early antiwar movement. She was the first in Congress to call for the impeachment of President Nixon. In 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that "in a perfectly just republic, Bella Abzug would be president."

A few weeks before the hearing, as we sipped green tea in her apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, Bella recounted how she had spearheaded what became a global movement against nuclear proliferation.

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